*Actually, we're just going to send Minion Number Two and he's just going to bruise the little tyke's face with his gas-mask. This, however, is still better than being kissed by the candidate.)

A message down the firing range from your fearless leader:

Greetings, bulls-eyes,

This week I have to confess that I'm at a bit of fan-boy heaven over the return of some of my favorite TV villains, the Cylons! Okay, admittedly, the Cylons have been back for a while in Ron Moore's wonderfully reimagined version of Battlestar Galactica on the SciFi Channel.

But while the new "skin jobs" played by the likes of Grace Park and Tricia Helfer are easy on the eyes, and the new CGI metal Cylons are pretty cool, I still miss the old-school chrome-plated "toasters" with their grating, mechanical voices and signature, scanning, red eye.

Not long ago, I heard rumors that the 2-hour Galactica movie, Razor, would flash back to the first Cylon war, and that this might feature the appearance of some Cylon models more familiar to us Galactica old timers. SciFi later decided to carve out these "flashback" sequences and turn them into two-minute episodes that would air as promotional spots as as webisodes, so I didn't even have to wait until the late-November premier of Razor to find out.

Well, my hopes were raised in Flashback #3, where a young William Adama fights against some decidedly retro-style Cylon raiders. The big pay-off, though is is Flashback #4, where Adama comes face to face with a Cylon pilot. Yes, it's old-school. No, it doesn't look like a guy in a suit this time. Yes, I am pleased.

Okay, I am a geek.

Okay, so I loved how the old Cylons looked and how they sounded, but lets face it, they were never a fraction of the threat that the new guys are. And thus the inspiration for this week's cartoon. See, those old Cylons could never hit the broad side of a barn. In fact, a archetypal old-Galactica scene would be to have Starbuck or Apollow (or both) encounter a group of Cylons in a corridor somewhere. The Cylons would shoot first, and despite our heroes making no effort to take cover, they would miss. In fact, the Cylons could fire any number of rounds and they would seem to hit anything but the heroes standing in plain sight. Then Starbuck (or Apollo, or both) would squeeze off a singled shot, which would explode the dead-center of the nearest Cylon's chest, and it would fall down. Wash, rinse, repeat, until you run out of Cylons to shoot.

So for years, whenever my wife and I have seen TV or movie villains (or their minions) who couldn't seem to shoot straight when it came to hitting the good-guys, we identified them as graduates of the "Cylon School of Marksmanship." Well, finally, after all these years, we get to see how the process works.

3 comments:

"Hey, 'Anon,' what's your frickin' problem? I don't know what frickin' planet you live on, but I live on frickin' Earth. Frickin' space people say 'frak,' and your mamma clearly never told you how tell your frick from your frack, probably because she didn't know either. Frickin' four-eyed nerd-ass loser."

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